A trend that I hate is that trend where there is a fan art and the real character and the author of the video compares the colors
Now why do I hate this trend?
Bc the "real" character most of the time is 3D and it has shade lighting ecc... Like for a person who makes fan art(idk if drawing of Eddsworld you can call it fan art) it's really hard choosing the color
But! I stand this trend only when the color are totally wrong like for example :
"Girl dinner" is 3 pieces of pizza, 4 gummy peach rings (the rest of the package), and chocolate chip cookies. Because we don't support disordered or restrictive eating here
It's all: "Misscharacterization is the worst sin" and "He f***ing wouldn't say that" but have you considered that fandom creators are real people, who just want to have some fun with a character to escape the grind?
Not me having to stop reading an article, written by a professional adult writer, because they used "unalive himself" unironically in the body of the story.
I think 90% of my gripes with how modern anime looks comes down to flat color design/palettes.
Non-cohesive, washed-out color palettes can destroy lineart quality. I see this all the time when comparing an anime's lineart/layout to its colored/post-processed final product and it's heartbreaking. Compare this pre-color vs. final frame from Dungeon Meshi's OP.
So much sharpness and detail and weight gets washed out and flattened by 'meh' color design. I LOVE the flow and thickness and shadows in the fabrics on the left. The white against pastel really brings it out. Check out all the detail in their hair, the highlights in Rin's, the different hues to denote hair color, the blue tint in the clothes' shadows, and how all of that just gets... lost. It works, but it's not particularly good and does a disservice to the line-artist.
I'm using Dungeon Meshi as an example not because it's bad, I'm just especially disappointed because this is Studio Trigger we're talking about. The character animation is fantastic, but the color design is usually much more exciting. We're not seeing Trigger at their full potential, so I'm focusing on them.
Here's a very quick and messy color correct. Not meant to be taken seriously, just to provide comparison to see why colors can feel "washed out." Top is edit, bottom is original.
You can really see how desaturated and "white fluorescent lighting" the original color palettes are.
[Remember: the easiest way to make your colors more lively is to choose a warm or cool tint. From there, you can play around with bringing out complementary colors for a cohesive palette (I warmed Marcille's skintone and hair but made sure to bring out her deep blue clothes). Avoid using too many blend mode layers; hand-picking colors will really help you build your innate color sense and find a color style. Try using saturated colors in unexpected places! If you're coloring a night scene, try using deep blues or greens or magentas. You see these deep colors used all the time in older anime because they couldn't rely on a lightness scale to make colors darker, they had to use darker paints with specific hues. Don't overthink it, simpler is better!]
A few days ago, in my quest to fight the antisemitism that lifted its head around the world following the massacre of October 7th, I stumbled upon a clip from a UN assembly where the speaker asked a simple question-
Dear Arab world, where are your Jews?
A lot of people think that Israeli roots come from Europe exclusively. But in fact, Jewish people were hunted in all corners of this world. In Europe, of course, but also in Asia, Africa and other places all over the planet.
My grandma is an Iraqi Jew. Iraqi Jewish community is one of the oldest Jewish communities in the world, being the direct descendants of the Babylonian exile Jews, so ancient it is an exile mentioned in the Bible.
Recent studies, in which DNA retrieved from canaanite burial lands was compared to current populations in the area of ancient Canaan, has found that Iraqi Jews share the highest similarity to canaanite DNA out of all Jewish communities, more than 50% of the DNA on average.
All the beautiful, peaceful Jewish communities of the Arab world were wiped out in the blink of an eye.
The Arabic world has never treated their Jewish communities as equal citizens, oftentimes robbing them of any rights and performing violent acts of genocide against them (check 'Farhud' on Google).
But their voice was silenced once they fled to Israel.
So I decided to recap my grandma's story in the comments of the clip:
Soon after, many Jewish people with Arabic, or 'Mizrahi' heritage, shared their stories as well:
Jewish people all over the planet were driven out of their homes, ethnically cleansed by their neighbors, rulers, and governments.
We are still not welcome in most of the countries of the Arab world. Unable to see glimpses of our history.
My grandma still wishes she could see the house she grew up in. Holding the memories, but unable to set foot in that land, because she would be executed.
Nevertheless, she's not a refugee. She might've fled to Israel, but in Israel, her family got equal rights as citizens, and she built a house on a land she now calls her home.
Don't erase my grandma's story. Don't erase the Jewish ethnic cleansing that brought her to seek a safe haven in Israel.
Israel is a home for more than half of the Jewish people on this planet. Out of the ~8,000,000 Jews who live in Israel, there are about ~2,500,000 Jews of Mizrahi heritage.
And as Golda Meir once said: "our secret weapon is that we have nowhere else to go."